1. Open sourcing is a fine idea, if there is demand for it. There are a million forum apps out there, though-- be honest-- do people REALLY love yours? 2. Ar

1. Open sourcing is a fine idea, if there is demand for it. There are a million forum apps out there, though-- be honest-- do people REALLY love yours? 2. Are there any/many companies making money doing this? I'd go narrower and perhaps aim at Support Forums (something companies pay money for). 3. Worth a shot. I think you need a design/marketeer/evangelist more than you need another dev. Keep it 1-developer simple until you nail a narrow use case that has users/customers excited to keep coming back. Who on your team loves distribution problems? SEO? SEM? Bizdev? Blogging and tweeting? 4. Almost impossible. Very few people want someone else's (failed) codebase. In general, the current market you're attacking (a place for entrepreneurs to discuss) seems like a pretty crappy one. Can you name 5 high-margin companies that are positioned directly at the same audience? Pre-startup people are a penny-pinching bunch. Hard to charge them money, and few advertisers want access to that audience unless you've got pretty amazing scale/brand. Whatever you do, have a marketing plan. 99.9% of businesses hit the "wow, our sales aren't growing fast enough" wall. Don't count on word-of-mouth-- be happily surprised by it if it happens. If you're going to go with the pure-engineer team, try to think of a business that either solves a REALLY ACUTE pain or can capitalize on existing channels (app stores, SEO, Adwords, etc).